Recently, the Walla Walla Union Bulletin did a number of stories about gays in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Adventists are definitely an audience in Walla Walla, a town in eastern Washington of about 45,000 if you count the suburbs. Adventists operate Walla Walla University in College Place, a town next door. It has about 1,500 students, about the same amount that attend Whitman College, the other private liberal arts institution in town. The first story on March 28 starts thus:

Bradley Nelson’s “A Gay SDA Play” is coming out at a precipitous time in the Seventh-day Adventist Church as it wrestles with its traditional stance on homosexuality.
Since beginning work on the staged reading piece in 2008, the Walla Wall Valley resident used interviews he conducted over a year to portray the problems “of being gay and SDA” in a world that doesn’t always understand either, he said.

The result is a documentary-style presentation based on more than two dozen interviews that explores the real-life struggle between the Seventh-day Adventist religion — highly represented in the Walla Walla area — and people who come out as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender within its membership.

Next, the reporter writes two paragraphs explaining the church’s position against homosexuality, then swings back into profiling Nelson in very favorable terms. Halfway through the story, there are quotes from a theater professor at WWU.

“The church position is exclusionary,” she said. “It’s very similar to the civil rights puzzle in terms of race; I feel the rhetoric is the same.”

Venden said she is as Adventist as the play’s subjects. Her grandfather, Melvin Venden, was “a pretty famous” evangelist for the church, and her father, Morris Venden, was an international Adventist pastor, speaker and author. Speaking as the play’s director and not on behalf of the university, Venden said gay students don’t have a place or acceptance in any official capacity on the WWU campus.

After that, one might expect to hear an opposing voice from elsewhere on campus. Surely someone at WWU disagrees with the play. But there’s nothing.